What is Contact Improvisation?

Contact improvisation sits between martial arts and contemporary dance, without choreography or tempo. The movement is born from a state of deep listening. Playfulness comes paired with serious attention. The improvisation is the dance, and no two dances ever look the same. Most of the time no music guides a rhythm.

The martial arts side is the roots. Paxton studied the Aikido roll through the 1960s,¹⁴ and a 2022 article traces the rolling point of contact back through Aikido and Taijiquan push-hands.⁶ On the dance side it comes out of post-modern dance, with Judson, Grand Union and the Cunningham physics behind it.²

A dance follows weight and momentum. Paxton calls the momentum two people build the third partner, the thing that leads.¹⁴ Emma Bigé gives the musical version of the same idea: where music gives a dance tonal space, contact improvisation gives tonic space, with coordinates defined by weight and dancers bathed in the gravitational field.¹⁵

Listening is the core of the practice. Earthdance's jam guidelines begin with listening to others and listening to yourself.⁸ Nita Little describes attention-to-attention as the training,¹⁶ and Deans and Pini found that skill grows as finer awareness of your own and your partner's kinaesthetic sense.¹⁷

Playfulness and serious attention live together in this form. Emma Bigé organises it around seven gestures, and playing sits in the list beside falling, weighing, looking and touching.¹⁸ A score that holds both at once is Lisa Nelson's 1977 peacock feather: balance a feather on your palm and move only to keep it up.¹⁹

Researchers who interviewed dancers about creating found that movement mostly emerges between two bodies as a stream of tiny moment-to-moment decisions answering what the partner's weight offers.²⁰

Paxton also improvised solo to Bach in 1991²¹ and to Glenn Gould's recording of the Goldberg Variations in the early 1990s.²²

Three ideas behind the form

Everything taught in a class or practised at a jam comes back to three facts: a dancer's relation to gravity, a dancer's relation to the partner, and where attention goes. The shelves of this library are organised the same way.

Gravity: weight and falling

Touch on its own is not the form. Weight has to pass from one body to the other, by leaning, falling, being caught or lifting. Emma Bigé describes each partner as a floor for the other and every step as a modulated arc of falling.²³ Because up and down become relative to the partner's body, a back can serve as a floor, a wall or a ramp.²⁴ A fall is therefore movement to travel through, not an accident to prevent. When Paxton asked at Oberlin how to keep people safe, his answer was to sharpen the senses and to teach people to fall and roll, drawing on the Aikido roll he had practised through the 1960s.¹⁴

The partner: a moving point of contact and nobody leading

The dancers' bodies meet at a place that is rarely still: as the dance travels it rolls across backs, hips and shoulders, and neither dancer decides in advance where it will go. A 2022 study traces this rolling contact back to Aikido and to the spirals of Taijiquan push-hands, and lists centre of gravity, weight sharing, point of contact, sphericity and rolling as the pieces the form carried over.⁶ Most partner dances give one person the job of proposing and the other the job of answering. Contact improvisation has no such roles. Paxton calls the momentum two people build the third partner, and says that the leader is the movement.¹⁴ María Paz Brozas-Polo sets tango's explicit roles against the form's professed equality, and warns that an open jam can still let power concentrate.²⁵ Dancers orient from the body's centre of mass rather than from the arms, and keep the sphere of space around the body alive, so that a partner's weight is met by the whole structure.⁶

Attention: listening through the skin

Listening is done through skin and weight rather than with the eyes. Paxton's interior techniques used verbal images to turn a dancer's attention inward to sensation, and he noted that merely imagining a step already shifts the weight.²⁶ A fingertip exercise recorded by Malaika Sarco-Thomas, follow the one you lead, treats the space between two fingers as a third agent in the dance.²⁷ Nita Little calls attention-to-attention the training itself.¹⁶

What it looks like

Two people meet and start improvising from the moment contact is established, whether physical or not.²⁸ Once bodies touch, the point of contact rolls, and weight is shared between the dancers and the floor.⁶ Paxton's 1972 account describes dancers who orient by weight and touch, and bodies that collide and blend into one falling mass.²⁹

The audience is part of the scene too. How an audience shapes an improviser's choices is a subject in Kent De Spain's Landscape of the Now, a book built on interviews with master teachers of improvisation.³⁰

His founding technical statement from 1975 puts it as finding the easiest pathways within mutually dependent masses, with touch and balance as the base senses.³

How it differs from other practices

Every contact dance is improvised, but improvised dance is the wider field: a solo danced to music without touch is dance improvisation and not contact improvisation. What marks the form is shared weight through a point of contact.³ Partnering, the skill of moving in weighted contact with another dancer, runs through ballet and contemporary dance as well; the form is built entirely on it without owning it.³¹ Tango assigns a leader and a follower; contact improvisation assigns neither.²⁵ Aikido and push-hands are among its roots, and the borrowed pieces are documented, but the form is a dance and not a martial art.⁶ Practices such as AcroYoga, Ecstatic Dance and 5Rhythms share either partner contact or free movement with it and come from different lineages.³²

Where it came from

The form grew out of post-modern dance, and Steve Paxton is the figure at its centre. Hilde Rustad's obituary of Paxton places Judson, Grand Union and the Cunningham physics behind it, and records that he chose a newsletter over certification.² Paxton wrote in 1972 that Grand Union became leaderless, with improvisation the one form all could join as equals.²⁹

Nancy Stark Smith and Lisa Nelson, who were there, wrote the shortest reliable history: one page in Contact Quarterly in 1980.¹ In January 1972, at Oberlin College, eleven men threw, caught, collided and fell for ten minutes in a piece called Magnesium, then stood. That spring Paxton met Leon Felder and Nita Little at Bennington. In June, about fifteen athletes spent a week rehearsing and a week showing the work five hours a day at the Weber Gallery in New York, in an event called Contact Improvisation.¹

A 1973 West Coast tour went out under the name "You Come, We'll Show You What We Do." The group performed in Rome that June. ReUnion followed in 1975, and the Contact Newsletter started the same year.¹

Nearly every major city now has a class or a jam. Major hubs include Berlin, London, New York, Buenos Aires, Koh Phangan in Thailand and Goa in India, among many others.³³ The biggest gatherings are festivals. The Freiburg Contact Festival in Germany calls itself Europe's oldest, largest and most international CI festival,³⁴ and the library holds its video archive.⁹ Berlin has a Meetup group and regular public jams.³⁵ The library documents how the form took root in Spain³⁶ and in Buenos Aires.³⁷

What you practise

Standing: the small dance

Paxton introduced standing, which he calls the small dance or the stand, in 1972 so that gravity could be observed working on the upright body.⁴ His instruction starts with the skeleton: the skull balanced on the spine, the lungs expanding, your relation to gravity. It moves to weight and compression through the bones while the muscles stay soft.³⁸ You can hear him read it in 5 minutes 50 seconds.³⁹ In an interview annotated in 2013 he regrets that standing has dropped out of practice,⁴ and two talks from the 2014 Breitenbush Jam say why it keeps earning its place.⁴⁰ More on the small dance.

Gravity and falling

Paxton describes gravity as the field and the moving point of contact as the figure.⁴ Up and down become relative to your partner's body, so a back can be a floor, a wall or a ramp.²⁴ When Paxton asked how to keep people safe, his answer was to sharpen the senses, keep the sphere around the body lively, and teach people to fall and roll so that a topple agrees with the floor.¹⁴ Serena Massimo argues that repeated falling teaches a sensitivity to weight, giving and receiving it, until falling stops being frightening.¹² More on falling and gravity.

Attention and questions

Daniel Lepkoff describes the form as posing and holding a physical question about your own present circumstance, a question that sits in bones, muscles, organs and nerves. On where down is, he writes: "Only gravity has that information."⁴¹

Catherine Deans and Sarah Pini interviewed dancers about skill. They found it to be finer awareness of your own and your partner's kinaesthetic sense, plus an embodied "not knowing yet" and an ease in being off balance. Expertise, in their account, is the ability to slide between having agency and handing it over.¹⁷

Classes, jams and the Underscore

Most people meet the form in a class or a jam. Earthdance's published jam guidelines say you can leave or end a dance at any time for any reason, and that social talk happens off the dance space.⁸ Organisers disagree about what jams are for. María Paz Brozas-Polo maps five types of answer.⁴² More on jams.

Other formats share the same floor. A lab is a smaller research session built around one physical question, with room for stopping to talk; a festival gathers classes and jams over several days; an intensive keeps one group with the same teachers for days or weeks; a retreat trades teaching for time away from daily life; a silent jam runs without music, and a silent festival without speech.⁴³

Nancy Stark Smith's Underscore treats a whole jam as one composed arc. She developed it from 1990 on, and it is practised worldwide every June as the Global Underscore.⁵ More on the Underscore and on Nancy Stark Smith.

Consent, touch and care

The touch is functional. Weight needs a surface, so contact lands on backs, hips and shoulders wherever the moment puts it, and the form is not a romantic or sexual practice.⁴⁴ Philadelphia's five principles name physical, sexual and emotional boundaries separately and ask dancers to speak up when one is crossed.⁴⁵ Keith Hennessy records that the form challenged the hierarchy of the vertical body and the role of gender in partnering.⁴⁶

The form's founding rule, take care of yourself, can put responsibility on the least powerful person in the room. Michelle Beaulieux makes that argument in Contact Quarterly and describes what communities changed after #MeToo.⁴⁷

Consent to touch is given and withdrawn in the moment, between the two dancers. One community's written guidelines, from Philadelphia, say being in the room is not consent, that consent can change mid-dance, and that consent with one partner does not extend to a third.⁴⁵ Earthdance's guidelines add that you can leave or end a dance at any time for any reason, and that dancers should check in with partners.⁸ Brynn Williams's UBC thesis studies how consent is embodied and communicated without words, through the touch itself.¹⁰ The consent page and the consent shelf hold the texts behind it.

Who can do it

The library's accessibility text treats accessibility as a founding principle, with a lineage that includes DanceAbility and work with blind dancers, and adds the honest caveat that touch remains a social barrier.⁴⁸ A film shows Paxton in a contact duet with Gerry Overington, who is completely blind.⁴⁹

Where to start

• Daniel Lepkoff's short essay, which the library suggests handing to the next person who asks what CI is.⁴¹
• Hilde Rustad's obituary of Paxton, short enough to hand a new dancer who asks who he was.²
• Paxton's own voice guiding a standing practice, and a page of exercises to try.³⁹
• Cheryl Pallant's general introduction to the form,⁵⁰ and Cynthia Novack's Sharing the Dance, the founding ethnography.⁵¹

The full library has every text, film and book on ten shelves.

Frequently asked questions

Sources in the library

Alessi, Eric (curator). “What is Contact Improvisation?.” The Wiki of Contact Improvisation. Published 30 October 2026, updated 31 October 2026. https://ci-wiki.com/what-is-contact-improvisation/. Accessed .